The Community Cultural Development Field

From Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard’s Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, a book commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2001. The book traces the history, methods, values and theories of community cultural-development practice as a response to destructive social forces. In particular, it considers work done through the Rockefeller program Partnerships Affirming Community Transformation (PACT). In this essay, these two top consultants define "community arts," "community animation" and "cultural work," then look at cultural responses to social conditions, global proliferation of mass media, mass migrations, recognition of cultural minorities and the effects of globalization. The book can be ordered free from the publication section of the Rockefeller Web site. —Community Arts Network

Our topic turns on a paradox.

The community cultural development field is global, with a decades-long history of practice, discourse, learning and impact. In Europe and much of the developing world, the work of the field was recognized by cultural authorities, development agencies and funders as a meaningful way to assist communities coping with the forces of modernization. As the phenomenon of globalization accelerates, trailing protest in its wake, community cultural development practice is more and more widely recognized as a powerful means of awakening and mobilizing resistance to imposed cultural values.

But the United States’ active community cultural development field is nearly invisible as a phenomenon. There has been no sustained support for community cultural development per se in the United States, forcing practitioners to struggle for legitimation. Because it employs the same art forms as conventional arts disciplines (e.g., dance, painting, film), work in the field has mostly been treated as a marginal manifestation of mainstream arts activities—for instance, as "community-based theater projects," competing for a tiny fraction of theater-oriented funding; or as "audience development initiatives," arguing for their role in nurturing new audiences by bringing new people into contact with arts work. The result is a U.S. field that appears atomized and dispersed, with no clear identity as a profession. Constantly reinventing arguments to convince funders of the legitimacy of their efforts, constantly reframing their work to fit the guidelines of social-service or conventional arts-discipline funders, community artists have been unable to develop the infrastructure that legitimates a profession—its own widely accepted standards, journals of theory and practice, training initiatives and support sources.

Indeed, people in the United States don’t even know what to call this category of social action. Many different names are in simultaneous use:

Community arts. This is the common term in Britain and most other Anglophone countries; but in U.S. English, it is also sometimes used to describe conventional arts activity based in a municipality, such as "the Anytown Arts Council, a community arts agency." While in this document we use "community artists" to describe individuals engaged in this work, to avoid such confusion, we have chosen not to employ the collective term "community arts" to describe the whole enterprise.

Community animation. From the French animation socio-culturelle, the common term in Francophone countries. There, community artists are known as animateurs. This term was used in much international discussion of such work in the 1970s.

Cultural work. This term, with its roots in the panprogressive Popular Front cultural organizing of the ’30s, emphasizes the socially conscious nature of the work, stressing the role of the artist as cultural worker, countering the tendency to see art-making as a frivolous occupation, a pastime as opposed to important labor.

"Participatory arts projects," "community residencies," "artist/community collaborations"—the list of labels is very long. Even though it is a mouthful, we prefer "community cultural development" because it encapsulates the salient characteristics of the work:

• Community, to distinguish it from one-to-many arts activity and to acknowledge its participatory nature, which emphasizes collaborations between artists and other community members;
  
  
• Cultural, to indicate the generous concept of culture (rather than, more narrowly, art) and the broad range of tools and forms in use in the field, from aspects of traditional visual- and performing-arts practice, to oral-history approaches usually associated with historical research and social studies, to use of high-tech communications media, to elements of activism and community organizing more commonly seen as part of non-arts social-change campaigns; and
  
  
• Development, to suggest the dynamic nature of cultural action, with its ambitions of conscientization (explained in Glossary, excerpted below) and empowerment and to link it to other enlightened community-development practices, especially those incorporating principles of self-development rather than development imposed from above.

Within the community cultural development field, there is a tremendous range of approach, style, outcome—every aspect of the work. The balance of this volume provides a more complete description.

Cultural Responses to Social Conditions

Community cultural development work is inevitably a response to current social conditions. The precise nature of this response always shifts as social circumstances change. In the period since the ’60s—the decades that have shaped the current field—these forces have been, as Machiavelli put it so elegantly half a millennium ago, "...like the hectic fever which, as the doctors tell us, at first is easy to cure though hard to recognize, but in time, if it has not been diagnosed and treated, becomes easy to recognize and hard to cure."[1]

Global Proliferation of Mass Media

Since the advent of radio, motion pictures and television, penetration of commercial mass-media products around the globe has proceeded at a pace unparalleled in history. In its wake have arisen several disturbing social trends:

• the breakdown of traditional multidirectional means of cultural transmission and preservation in favor of the unidirectional transmission of mass-produced cultural products such as film, television and recorded music;
  
  
• the creation of a global youth market that has broken long-standing patterns of transmission for traditional cultural heritage, effectively alienating youth from cultural roots and substituting products for an immaterial legacy; and
  
  
• the pervasive passivity of consumer culture overtaking live, in-person activities that bring people into the commons and into direct contact with each other, with an attendant decline in the vitality of civil society.

We do not mean to suggest a simple dichotomy here: commercial culture, bad; traditional culture, good. Along with the products they exist to sell, commercial cultural industries have indeed sometimes spread liberatory ideas of individual choice and social mobility. As Robert McChesney has pointed out:

Global conglomerates can at times have a progressive impact on culture, especially when they enter nations that had been tightly controlled by corrupt media crony systems (as in much of Latin America) or nations that had significant state censorship over media (as in parts of Asia).[2]

Because commercial media have one imperative—to expand profits through expansion of their clientele—constraints such as cronyism and state control are viewed merely as temporary obstacles, glitches in a larger marketing plan. When such obstacles are overcome, the net result is to expose populations to a broader range of news, a wider spectrum of programming suggesting new life-possibilities—as well as virtually unlimited opportunity to arouse new needs that can be fed in the marketplace. But the progressive impact of global conglomerates does not extend so far as to incite political change, since transnational corporations, in media as in other fields, are intrinsically conservative, always preferring a stable climate over the volatility that leads to rebellion or revolution.

The advent of new media has also softened the distinction between consumption and participation. When you sit in front of a computer "conversing" with other computer users, are you an active participant in the life of a particular (albeit virtual) community? Or have you merely succumbed to the enchantment of seeing your own words on television? These questions will remain unsettled for some time. Without dismissing the genuine cause for hope represented by new technologies’ democratic potential, any provisional judgment should be based on mass media’s impacts to date, not their unrealized possibilities. If advocates of free cyberspace prevail, the trend may be reversed; but until then, surely the channeling of cultural energy into consumer choices is the primary effect of current arrangements.

The formidable challenge lies in allowing people a larger, more meaningful choice, as articulated by Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, former Director-General of UNESCO:

The only pertinent question facing us today is not only of choosing between an outdated past and imitation of the foreign but of making original selections between cultural values which it is vital to safeguard and develop—because they contain the deep-lying secrets of our collective dynamism—and the elements which it is henceforth necessary to abandon—because they put a brake on our facility for critical reflection and innovation. In the same way we must sort out the progressive elements offered by industrial societies, so as only to use those which are adapted to the society of our choice which we are capable of taking over and developing gradually by ourselves and for ourselves.[3]

Because American consumer cultural industries are inarguably the main generators of commercial cultural products, many other nations have mobilized to protect themselves from this onslaught from Hollywood—for instance, by enacting legislation mandating a certain percentage of "domestic content" on their own airwaves or by taxing American product to finance indigenous media development. But within the United States, there has been only minimal regulation of commercial exploitation of broadcast media and other cultural industries and no organized effort has succeeded in highlighting the need to protect living cultures from the deadening effects of a surfeit of mass media.

The U.S. role in international discourse concerning this problem has been to vigorously dismiss it as no problem at all: the U.S. government has never reversed Ronald Reagan’s 1984 decision to leave UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), the primary international forum for such dialogue. (The United Kingdom, which withdrew from UNESCO at the same time, rejoined in 1997.)

On those pre-1984 occasions when an official American voice joined the UNESCO dialogue, it was to reject any "internationally imposed cultural standards or norms limiting, in any way, the rights of individuals.... Our cultural policy is a policy of freedom."[4] The classic translation of this language was provided by French cultural minister Jack Lang: "Cultural and artistic creation is today victim of a system of multinational financial domination against which it is necessary to get organized.... Yes to liberty, but which liberty? The liberty...of the fox in the henhouse which can devour the defenseless chickens at his pleasure?" [5]

In the nearly two decades since these positions were put forward, global saturation of American commercial media product has reached undreamed-of levels, a core component of the complex now referred to as "globalization."

Mass Migrations

The social upheavals and violent conflicts of the last four decades have produced an unprecedented flood of refugees and exiles. Certain situations are familiar to consumers of news. For example, the visibility of the Dalai Lama has brought attention to the way Chinese domination has endangered traditional Tibetan culture and to the massive emigration of Tibetans from their homeland. Many less visible crises have contributed to the primary flow of refugees from South to North. While it is possible to maintain some cultural continuity in diaspora, there is no question that being forcibly uprooted from one’s homeland leads to cultural deracination, which in turn leads to anomie.

This latest project is the biggest challenge ever.… These newer [Southeast Asian] immigrants—most are refugees and they have a different mind-set [than previous immigrant groups],…youth violence, high failure rates and a real void in leadership from these communities. So we’re trying partnerships with emerging organizations and social-service agencies and trying to find strategies for program development; but all of this is very complex. It raises many issues. It takes work, care, negotiation, leadership skills. Amazing stuff comes out and healing. But I’m putting out fires all the time.[6]

Within the United States, the dynamic has been similar, especially during the ’60s and ’70s, when urban renewal projects (known to those they displaced as "urban removal") banked on ending poverty and urban blight by demolishing inner-city neighborhoods, forcing the inhabitants to relocate, thus eliminating both the material and immaterial networks that previously sustained local culture. These internal migrations have been further complicated by ongoing transformation of the American cultural landscape through immigration, leading in recent years to a resurgent backlash of anti-immigrant feeling.

Recognition of Cultural Minorities

Ours has been an era of cultural particularization, marked by what the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes has called "the emergence of cultures as protagonists of history."[7] The question of whether they are protagonists in a tragedy or triumph is not settled.

In the United States, we have seen growing recognition of minority cultures as distinct and different in character, reflected in better textbook histories and school curricula; the availability of ethnic foods, dress, literature and music; the proliferation of culturally distinct celebrations, festivals, observances. But at the same time, oppositional feeling and the incidence of persecution—synagogue fires, anti-immigrant legislation, anti-Asian violence, organized white supremacist activity—have also become more visible through the media, even when their frequency has declined.[8]

Around the globe, "people turn to culture as a means of self-definition and mobilization and assert their local cultural values. For the poorest among them, their own values are often the only thing that they can assert."[9] The cultures of major European and American cities have become immeasurably more vibrant, diverse and lively as a result of such assertions. In many other parts of the world, the result has been more mixed, leading simultaneously to a greater overall autonomy—as in the key part Islamic culture played in overturning the Shah of Iran—and a corresponding lessening of freedom for individuals who wish to diverge from the presumed cultural consensus—as for those Iranians who were resistant to adopting the lifeways of fundamentalist Shiite Islam under the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Movements for national liberation frequently gain energy from suppressed religious loyalty, as in Iran. But the result is often framed as a choice between freedoms—on the one hand, a form of religious liberty that replaces secular oppression with theocracy, guaranteeing the right to certain types of religious expression; and on the other hand, the liberty of individuals to eschew belief, to reject the imposition of codes of behavior derived from fundamentalism. In such contests, individual liberty is often defeated. Though the consequences have sometimes been troubling, the fact of human diversity and the recognition of this fact have nevertheless unquestionably transformed our era.

"Culture Wars"

One of the characteristic themes of our period has been polarization of cultural values. The two contending camps have been fundamentalism and liberal humanism: on one side is the impulse to eliminate cultural expression that offends received religious and social beliefs; on the other, the impulse to promote free expression of divergent views.

We have seen countless manifestations, from the burning of books in revolutionary Iran to the hue and outcry over witchcraft in the Harry Potter series of children’s stories. In the United States, there has been an unending stream of controversy over works of art that are perceived as dangerous when viewed from the fundamentalist camp: Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexual images, Andres Serrano’s and Chris Ofili’s religious ones, Marlon Riggs’s challenging transgressions of racial and sexual taboos.

In the community cultural development field, these "culture wars" (Pat Buchanan’s rubric has become the label of choice across the political spectrum) have most often arisen around works of public art: for instance, the "zero tolerance" crime-fighting campaign of Los Angeles’ Mayor Riordan has led police to demand the obliteration of alternative-history murals in communities of color. Images that have been singled out include a Black Panther and a mestizo from the Mexican Revolution, on the grounds that portrayals of past rebellion will inspire fresh revolt.

Globalization

Many of the conditions discussed above can be understood as phenomena of globalization, the increasing irrelevance of national boundaries and interdependence of worldwide trade, capital and population.

Already, it is clear that while some have gained from the forces of globalization, many have lost:

Over a billion poor people have been largely bypassed by the globalization of cultural processes. Involuntary poverty and exclusion are unmitigated evils.... [A]ll too often in the process of development, it is the poor who shoulder the heaviest burden. It is economic growth itself that interferes with human and cultural development. In the transition from subsistence-oriented agriculture to commercial agriculture, poor women and children are sometimes hit hardest. In the transition from a traditional society, in which the extended family takes care of its members who suffer misfortunes, to a market society, in which the community has not yet taken on responsibility for the victims of the competitive struggle, the fate of these victims can be cruel. In the transition from rural patron-client relationships to relations based on the cash nexus, the poor suffer by losing one type of support without gaining another. In the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, the majority of rural people are neglected by the public authorities in favour of the urban population. In the transitions that we are now witnessing from centrally planned to market-oriented economies and from autocracies to democracies, inflation, mass unemployment, growing poverty, alienation and new crimes have to be confronted....

As a result of accelerated change, the impact of Western culture, mass communications, rapid population growth, urbanization, the break-up of the traditional village and of the extended family, traditional cultures (often orally transmitted) have been disrupted. Cultures are not monolithic and the elite culture, often geared to global culture, tends to exclude the poor and powerless.[10]

Globalization’s most obvious impacts have limited the ability of the poor and excluded to earn decent livelihoods. But advanced development thinkers such as the economist Amartya Sen[11] have made it clear that impoverishment and exclusion are not matters merely of economic power. It has been well-demonstrated, for instance, that life expectancy and health do not correlate neatly with per capita income: the citizens of Kerala, in India, have higher literacy rates and longer life expectancies than inner-city African-American men, whose average income is substantially higher. Sen’s Nobel Prize—winning work on the causes of famine demonstrated that free access to communications media is a most effective preventer of such human disasters, because an informed population will be able to learn and therefore address the causes of food shortage, almost always a problem of distribution (i.e., caused by political corruption or market abuses) rather than one of supply.

Yet the forces driving globalization are preeminently, almost exclusively economic: the push to open new markets, to consolidate and dominate those that have been established. While new information technologies hold great promise for increasing communication around the globe and thus cooperation toward greater freedom, their distribution is being determined largely by market forces, creating a growing digital divide between the haves and have-nots.

In this climate of inequality, the problems of how to distribute social goods in ways that lead to global inclusion—among them, freedom of expression and association and the right to culture with all it implies—do not seem to be on the agendas of transnational corporations. Weakened public sectors seldom demonstrate the will or ability to place them there, despite considerable popular sentiment in their favor, as demonstrated by opposition to the November 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle and to subsequent meetings around the world. In large part, it has been left to the third sector of NGOs, religious organizations, foundations and unions to seek a balance between the private pursuit of profit and the public good.

There is no indication that globalization will somehow bring about the reversal of its own destructive effects or even the amelioration of such effects. Rather, it demands responses that can exert powerful countervailing effects. Community cultural development efforts constitute one such response, making democratic counterforces of some of the same arts and media tools previously used to promote global saturation of commercial culture.

From the GLOSSARY of Creative Community:

Conscientization, from the Portuguese conscientizao of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is an ongoing process by which a learner moves toward critical consciousness. This process is the heart of liberatory education. It differs from "consciousness raising" in that the latter may involve transmission of preselected knowledge. Conscientization means breaking through prevailing mythologies to reach new levels of awareness—in particular, awareness of oppression, being an "object" of others’ will rather than a self-determining "subject." The process of conscientization involves identifying contradictions in experience through dialogue and becoming part of the process of changing the world. [return]

NOTES

1. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, written 1513, translated by Thomas G. Bergin (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Educational Division, 1947), p. 6. [return]

2. Robert W. McChesney, "The New Global Media," The Nation, Vol. 269, No. 18 (Nov. 29, 1999), p. 13. [return]

3. Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, "Opening of Leo Frobenius Seminar," Cultures, 6, No. 2 (1979), p. 144. [return]

4. Jean Gerard, UNITED STATES Ambassador to UNESCO, at the organization’s global cultural policies conference in Mexico City, August 1982. [return]

5. Jack Lang, French Cultural Minister, at UNESCO’s global cultural policies conference in Mexico City, August 1982. [return]

6. This quotation and all other unattributed quotations are drawn from confidential interviews conducted by the authors with artists and organizers involved in community cultural development projects in the United States in 1998 and 1999. [return]

7. Carlos Fuentes, Latin America: At War With The Past, Massey Lectures, 23rd Series (Toronto: CBC Enterprises, 1985), pp. 71-72. [return]

8. There is a significant lag in statistical compilation, but the FBI’s reported domestic hate crimes for the most recent available years declined overall from 8,049 in 1997 to 7,755 in 1998. (It is widely accepted that such crimes are underreported.) Within the overall statistics appeared certain contrary trends, such as a 14 percent increase in crimes based on sexual orientation. The Anti-Defamation League reported a 2 percent upturn in anti-Semitic incidents in 1998, after a three-year decline, but after that slight rise, incidents declined by 4 percent in 1999. As the ADL reported in its 1999 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, "Ironically, the latest decrease occurred in a year that also saw three of the most violent anti-Semitic incidents in many years, during the late spring and summer. On June 18, three synagogues were set afire in the Sacramento, Calif., area... On the July 4 weekend, a lone gunman went on a shooting rampage in the Midwest, killing two and seriously wounding eight, including six Chicago-area Jews. On August 10, a lone gunman walked into a Los Angeles day-care center and opened fire, injuring five people." [return]

9. Our Creative Diversity: Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development, Sec. Ed. (Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 1996). [return]

10. Op. cit., p. 30. [return]

11. See, for example, Sen’s book Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999) [return]

Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard have worked as partners in Adams & Goldbard since 1978, consulting in a wide variety of public and private agencies, most of them involved in cultural policy, artistic production and distribution, and cultural development planning and evaluation.

Original CAN/API publication: August 2001